Social Marketing: The Definitive Guide to Social Marketing campaign

This post stars Jason Miller and his company Marketo. (no relation to Jon). The story is about their social campaign for the Definitive Guide to Social Marketing. There are some great ideas and take-aways as we continue to try to answer the question: “Does social marketing work”?

Facebook worked, here is why:

Facebook is controversial in b2b since it is such a personal, consumer-driven social network, but Marketo was and has been successful there. The key to Facebook: Get people engaged in order to stay in the feed. I found some interesting takeaways:

1. Visual, Visual, Visual — to be successful in Facebook you have to have great visuals. Think about it, Facebook is a massive image sharing feed (pls see Instagram purchase), so you have to consider how your visual will compete.

2. Be fun — Facebook is a place for fun. People go to Facebook to break away from their day-to-day and have fun. Your promotions need to compete with the funny anecdotes and personal stories in everyone’s feed.

3. Juice the amplification with promoted post — Remember the key is to be in the feed. Promoted posts are a small amount of money to help you achieve that goal.

3. Your buyers are on Facebook, you just have to approach them correctly — Here is the prevailing irony in b2b Facebook marketing: “My buyers aren’t on Facebook” is a common b2b refrain yet there are a billion active users on Facebook. In other words, the odds tell you that you are wrong…they are on Facebook.

See some of their ads below.

Twitter worked, here is why:

Twitter is not controversial but results have been elusive for many. There some important things to learn from this campaign:

1. Leverage promoted tweets — Marketo is averaging about $37/prospect* via their paid Twitter activities. Many marketers are unaware of the power of the promoted tweet — Jason recommends buying both for search (you will show up when people search a keyword or hashtag) and timeline (you can designate the target “interest” and the promoted tweet will show up in their timeline)
*Prospect for Marketo is defined as “right person/company”, engaged with Marketo, and fits target profile.

2. Advocates and employees — I think a lot of marketers are getting good at using their army of employees but many marketers are still getting around to building their army of advocates (influencers, customers, etc).

3. Take a value based, serious tone on Twitter — You can see the copy below. The copy here is more classic copy.

Brand Influencers were key to the campaign, here is why:

Marketo ran a “Share to Win” contest. For every 5 referred downloads, brand influencers earned a printed copy of the Definitive Guide and t-shirt.

And the winner is….

Does social marketing work? Here are some results that should tell you “yes”:

1. Facebo0k — 1000+ downloads

2. Twitter — 300+ downloads

3. Average share resulted in 25 clicks

2 key take-aways:

1. Each social channel is unique — Similar to your more traditional multi-channel campaigns, make sure you understand what the community in each channel will respond to and test it. The Facebook approach versus Twitter approach seen above is a great example.

2. Paid is working — People ask me all the time about paid social campaigns, they worked here so add it to the mix

Stay classy social media. Until next time

Craig Rosenberg is the Funnelholic. He loves sales, marketing, and things that drive revenue. Follow him on Google+ or Twitter